- Black Lizard
Black Lizard was a
publisher imprint during the 1980s. A division of theCreative Arts Book Company ofBerkeley, California , Black Lizard specialized in presenting rediscovered forgotten classiccrime fiction writers and novels from the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s.Creative Arts Book Company was founded by Don Ellis in 1966. Creative Arts filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003.Creative Arts was best known for its Black Lizard imprint. Founded and edited by writer
Barry Gifford , Black Lizard released over ninety books between 1984 and 1990, including reprints of classic novels byCharles Willeford ,David Goodis ,Peter Rabe , Harry Whittington,Dan J. Marlowe , Charles Williams, andLionel White , as well as original novels byBarry Gifford andJim Nisbet . Lizard is single-handedly responsible for renewing the interest in pulp master Jim Thompson in the late 1980s, long after his death, which resulted in several film adaptations of his novels. The original series weremass-market paperback s with covers drawn by Kirwan.Barry Gifford 's relationship with Black Lizard is also sometimes credited with having first applied the termnoir fiction to a certain sub-genre ofhardboiled fiction. Thus, in an introduction writtern by Gifford to the Black Lizard editions of Jim Thompson's novels in 1984, Gifford writes: "The French seem to appreciate best Thompson's brand of terror. Roman noir, literally 'black novel,' is a term reserved especially for novelists such as Thompson,Cornell Woolrich andDavid Goodis . Only Thompson, however, fulfills the French notion of both "noir" and "maudit", the accursed and self-destructive. It is an unholy picture that Thompson presents. As the British criticNick Kimberley has written, 'This is a godless world,' populated by persons 'for whom murder is a casual chore.'" Gifford's use of the termnoir in this context resulted in a term that is narrower in scope than that used by the Frenchroman noir as applied to fiction.Random House bought the rights to the Black Lizard name in June 1990 and merged it withVintage Crime .Vintage Crime/Black Lizard was the result. Many of the originally published books were replaced bymainstream -friendly writers such asDashiell Hammett ,Raymond Chandler ,James M. Cain , as well as numerous contemporary authors. Themass-market paperback s were replaced bytrade paperback s withblack-and-white photographs on the covers. Most of the series was reprinted in this new format, but practically all of the books published by Lizard before the merge, with the notable exception of books by Jim Thompson, have been allowed to fall out of print and have remained so since the early 1990s.Catalog
By the time of its acquisition by
Random House , Black Lizard had issued the following novels (cover Illustrations, with three exceptions, by Jim Kirwan):External links
* [http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/blacklizard/ Vintage Crime/Black Lizard]
* [http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/lizard.html List of books originally published]
* [http://www.kirwanesque.com/cover_art/blb/blbcovers.htm Covers by Kirwan]
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